


Selfies

by shadowqueen



Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, V | Jihyun Kim's Route, v learning to love himself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-14 00:03:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12995433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowqueen/pseuds/shadowqueen
Summary: V experiments with photography. Slight V Route spoilers.(Written for Jihyun Week 2017 on Tumblr)





	Selfies

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](https://shadowreine.tumblr.com/post/168227628895/jihyun-week-day-4) for Jihyun Week's Day 4 theme, "Photography."

_**Click.**  _ **  
**

V doesn’t like taking pictures of himself. He’s the photographer, not the photographed. He’s more comfortable being the one behind the camera than the one in front of it. He minds it less, of course, if he’s in a group shot, where the focus is shared instead of it beng solely on him, but he much prefers staying out of the spotlight.

He takes a picture of himself now, though, with the front facing camera on his phone while he’s sitting in Luciel’s car. A selfie. He sees himself reflected on the screen; he hates the sight of it. He never takes selfies. He isn’t like the others in the RFA who take pictures of themselves and share them with everyone on the messenger. He looks at himself and doesn’t see anything beautiful or even marginally attractive. His hair is too strange a color, his frame too slight and lanky. He isn’t as good-looking as someone like Zen, a person who was born to be loved by a camera lens, or even Jumin, whose physical appeal is as elegant as it is effortless.

But he takes the picture nonetheless, even manages a small smile. He takes it for her. He wants her to remember him like this. He may not be beautiful or whole or even a good man, he’s not even a person worth remembering, but for some reason, whatever happens to him, he doesn’t want her to forget him.

He sends her the selfie before he can change his mind. A remnant of what he used to be, of what he could have been.

_**Click.** _

V doesn’t have his camera with him, not his professional one anyway. He’d wanted to travel lightly, with only a backpack of his essentials, and the camera that he’d once taken everywhere with him was left at home, packed away in a box.

He uses the camera on his phone to take pictures instead. He still has a photographer’s eye, but for the most part, he’s abandoned all desire to take photos solely for the aesthetic. He spends more time living in the moment, drinking in the monuments, landscapes, and cityscapes with his own two eyes rather than filtering them through a lens. His newly regained vision has given him a sharper sense of clarity, both literally and figuratively. He can’t believe that he was once willing to let himself go blind, and he’s glad that he didn’t, because then he would never have had the chance to see the world as he sees it now.

The pictures he does take are taken for his own pleasure, a memento of all the places he’s visited and the ones he’d like to visit again in the future.

He stands with a group of tourists in front of the Taj Mahal. Everyone beside him is snapping photos with their phones. If he were the same man he was a month ago, he would’ve opted for a more creative framing of the famous monument; he would’ve spent a few hours examining where the light hit, deciding on the perfect angle. Now, however, he doesn’t care for that. He takes a few photos as a keepsake, then slips his phone back into his pocket and admires the building’s beauty, visually tracing its domed roofs and symmetrical lines. He wonders whether he could replicate it with his own hand on paper.

He spots a teenage girl trying to take a selfie of herself with the Taj Mahal in the background, and he overhears her grumbles about how she can’t get the whole building in the frame. He offers to take her picture for her instead, but she politely declines, telling him that she wants a selfie to send to her friends back at home.

He doesn’t understand how a close (and badly) framed selfie could be more appealing than a wide shot, but he respects her wishes. He moves along.

_**Click.** _

V starts experimenting with selfies after that. He’s not sure why, exactly. Perhaps he’s been influenced by seeing so many tourists taking selfies around him, piquing his interest in trying it out for himself. He resolves to take at least one selfie every day as a marker of where he’d been and what he’d done that particular day, whether it was hiking across the Great Wall or watching an opera in Vienna.

At first, he hates doing it. He hates how he looks in every picture, and it takes him well over ten shots before he finds one that he’s relatively satisfied with. He doesn’t have anyone to send these pictures to, and it seems rather vain and selfish to have his camera roll full of only pictures of himself. But he’s persistent about it, and consistent. It becomes a ritual of some sort.

Eventually, he forgets to take other kinds of pictures on his travels, but he never forgets to take a selfie.

_**Click.** _

He finds he no longer hates looking at himself. Every day there is something new to admire. His hair isn’t strange, but unique. The same unique shade as his mother’s. His body isn’t skinny and lanky, but sturdy and lean from all the walking and hiking he’s done on his travels.

...Perhaps he is good-looking, after all.

He laughs at himself as he closes his photo app. Is this how it feels to be like Zen? He doesn’t think he’ll ever get to that level of self-love, but he’s comforted to know that the person he sees in those pictures, the person he sees in the mirror, isn’t a broken stranger, but a kind friend.

_**Click.** _

“Can you take a picture of me?” he says to a stranger.

He’s made it to the west coast of North America, and he’s traveling up the rocky shorelines of California. He wants a picture of himself standing on the cliff’s edge, standing with the ocean and the horizon rolling endlessly behind him. It’s an image he can’t convey with a close-shot selfie, and so he politely asks a middle aged woman for her assistance.

“Oh sure, honey,” she says, and she takes his phone. She backs away from a him a few steps, getting him in frame, then she counts out loud.

He smiles. When she reaches the number three, the phone’s mock shutter clicks.

He thanks her as she hands him his phone. As he expects, the woman comments on his uniquely colored hair. He’s used to it by now, and he finds it amusing that no one seems to believe him when he says it’s his natural color. It’s a wonderful conversation starter, he’s come to realize. He’s met so many people since he left home. Everyone has a story.

The woman hikes alongside him for a while. She’s a tourist herself, and she explains that she’s taking an impromptu trip from the eastern coast of Canada after going through a strenuous divorce. He sympathizes and says he left Korea almost two years ago for a similar reason, but he doesn’t go into detail.

“Wow, two years,” she says. “Do you plan on going back sometime?”

He nods. “Eventually. When I feel ready.”

“So where are you headed to next?”

“I hear Alaska is nice. I’d like to go there.”

Soon, they part ways. The woman expresses that it was nice meeting him and that she wishes him luck in the future. Then she asks for his name.

“Jihyun. Jihyun Kim.”

The woman repeats it back to him. “That’s a lovely name.”

“Thank you,” he says. “I think so too.”

_**Click.** _

Jihyun looks at the photo she took of him on the cliff. He has to admit, the woman has a good eye.

The landscape in the picture is breathtaking. Jihyun stands in the center, the bright sun glinting off his turquoise hair that almost blends into the blue sky behind him. His smile is wide, and his eyes glitter like the ocean.

He almost doesn’t recognize himself. He’s used to seeing his own selfies, pictures taken by his own hand and perspective, so seeing himself through the eyes of a stranger was a new experience.

Even so, he knows the man in the picture is him. It’s a reflection of himself, as he is. As he has become.

It’s the most beautiful photograph he’s ever seen.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic based on my own headcanon that V starts taking selfies as he learns to love himself, since it is actually a helpful method in boosting one's self-confidence (which I can vouch for at least, coming from personal experience). I also think that the concept of V turning the camera toward himself for a change is very powerful and symbolic of the journey he went through in his route and Good Ending.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
